Summary: The quality of this issue is better than than usual (and more consistent). Although there is nothing particularly outstanding, Josephine Saxton’s debut story, The Wall, is noteworthy.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 268 of 365)
Graham Hall, Vector #36, November 1965, p. 12

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli; Associate Editor, J. Parkhill-Rathbone

Fiction:²
The Day of the Doomed King • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗
The Saga of Sid • short story by Ernest Hill ∗
Beyond Time’s Aegis • novelette by Craig A. Mackintosh and Brian Stableford [as by Brian Craig] ∗∗+
The Wall • short story by Josephine Saxton ∗∗∗+
Yesterdays’ Gardens • short story by Johnny Byrne ∗
The Weirwoods (Part 2 of 2) • serial by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Keith Roberts
SF or Not SF? A Letter from a Reader • by Brian Stableford
Letter from a Reader • by Kenneth F. Slater

_____________________

The Day of the Doomed King by Brian W. Aldiss is set, presumably, in medieval times, and starts with the wounded King Vukasan and his general, Jovann, taking refuge in a countryside church after Turkish forces have defeated their Serbian army. When the king wakes up after resting he sees a wooden screen in the room with a painted design, and the nearby lake through the window.
The pair then leave for the capital to raise the alarm and another army but, en route, the king sees a magpie with a lizard in its mouth. The bird dies, and Vukasan thinks this as an omen, so he decides to detour to a nearby monastery to ask a seer what this means.
After the pair pass a shepherd boy, who points to signs of the pursuing Turks, and a cart with a dead driver, Vukasan still insists on going to the monastery rather than going straight to the capital. When Vukasan consults the seer, he gets two predictions, one good, one bad. The good one tells of a greater Serbian Empire:

“You rule wisely, if without fire, and make a sensible dynastic marriage, securing the succession of the house of Josevic. The arts and religion flourish as never before in the new kingdom. Many homes of piety and learning and law are established. Now the Slavs come into their inheritance, and go forth to spread their culture to other nations. Long after you are dead, my king, people speak your name with love, even as we speak of your grandfather, Orusan. But the greatness of the nation you founded is beyond your imagining. It spreads right across Europe and the lands of the Russian. Our gentleness and our culture goes with it. There are lands across the sea as yet undiscovered; but the day will come when our emissaries will sail there. And the great inventions of the world yet to come will spring from the seed of our Serbian knowledge, and the mind of all mankind be tempered by our civility. It will be a contemplative world, as we are contemplative, and the love in it will be nourished by that contemplation, until it becomes stronger than wickedness.”  p. 16

After this the king hears the other prediction—where the Turks triumph and his reign is lost to history—and the seer concludes by saying that he cannot tell which one will pass. He does, however, point out that the contemplative nature of the Vukasan’s society will not help win the war against the Turks, and points to the King’s delays and detours on his current journey.
Vukasan (spoiler) then wakes to find he is still in the church that he and Jovann first stopped at, and realises the journey to the monastery was a dream, or a vision. He dies, and Jovann arranges a proper funeral. Because of this further delay, the future Serbian empire seen in the vision never happens.
This is a well described, mainstreamish story, and one that offers a brief if tantalising alt-history vision.³

•

The Saga of Sid by Ernest Hill starts with a vicar watching a christening party from the vestry and thinking quite un-vicar like and borderline misanthropic thoughts before going in to officiate at the service. During this, the baby speaks:

They gathered around: the Jacques, the godparents, the woman next door, Hetty’s parents and old Molly Braddock absent from the cherry-picking with a sprained ankle. He took the child and held it, swathed in its christening robes, over the bowl that now for practical purposes had replaced the ancient Norman font.
“The child’s name?” he whispered.
“They are going to call me Sid,” the baby said, “I don’t like it very much as a name, but if it keeps them happy . . .”  p. 21

After the vicar’s initial irritation at what he presumes is a practical joke, the story moves on to its next scene, an abortive kidnapping attempt by a bell-ringer who overheard the baby, and a passing circus owner to whom he has sold the information. Baby Sid acts dumb at this point and the bell ringer exits stage left, pursued by the circus owner.
The rest of this rambling story charts Sid’s development, and there are subsequently mentions of Asgard, monotheism, and various other subjects. Eventually, his mother takes him to the vicar to be exorcised, whereupon Sid learns he can’t bear to be near mistletoe.
After the exorcism (spoiler) a transparent green flying saucer appears carrying Odin and Frigg, who inform Sid that his body hosts the soul of Baldur, which they rescued from “Hel.” They take Baldur away, leaving Sid’s body behind, which is now a normal infant.
This is a very odd piece and, although it has some interesting parts, they don’t fit together into a coherent or plausible story.

•

Beyond Time’s Aegis by Craig A. Mackintosh and Brian Stableford begins with what seems to be gibberish:

Time is not merely a dimension measuring the passage of days and nights. Time is a property of the minds of men. And because the race of Man is finite, so too, in a sense, is Time. The present is ever moving to the future, and one day there will come a time when it has run its course. Then, for mankind, there will be no more future.
There will still be days and nights but, for the human race, Time will have stopped. There will be no more progress, no more hope for the future. Time will have exhausted the spirit which makes men build. And then cities will fall, and Man will cease to live—he will only exist.
But there are forces other than Time. And there will always be rebels.  p. 39

Anyway, the rebel mentioned above calls himself the Firefly (“because I reject this world and its torpor, and cast my own light”), and he has an number of adventures in this strange future world while on a quest to find a time walker, a man who Firefly hopes can take him back to the past, and a better life.
Initially Firefly consults a seer called The Red Wolf Queen at an inn; next he talks to a man in the desert who appears to have part of the sun suspended between two towers; then he meets a warrior called the Condor, who has a shield with fine art painted on it, created by the latter’s uncle, to whom the Condor later introduces the Firefly. Then there is a man dancing in the desert who is scared of his own shadow (and which later consumes the man); the Lungfish, who says that he and his kind are a bridge between mankind’s current existence and the new one coming when time finally stops; a religious cult who think the moon brings night; and, finally, a giant who thinks he is God and who makes statues.
Penultimately, the Firefly comes to a village and, in one of the houses, talks to a dwarf who offers him the chance to travel in time. The Firefly accepts the offer and finds himself in a city with many people around him, while he hears the voices of all the characters he has encountered on his quest. When the experience stops he realises the dwarf drugged him.
Finally, the Firefly comes to the Crossroads of the World, a series of metalled roads, and gets lost in the mist. After blundering around for a while, he meets the Guide, who points towards The Peak of the Thunderer. There he finds the The Man Who Walked Through Time, but learns it is only possible to travel forward in time, not back. In the ensuing discussion The Man Who Walked Through Time tells the Firefly that the Lungfish is correct about what man’s next evolution will be, and is part of a colony of mutants helping homo superior to evolve. Firefly refuses to have anything to do with the project, but The Man Who Walked Through Time knows that the Firefly will come back because everyone else in the world is happy except him.
This is, despite the description above, an entertaining enough read, and I was tempted to give it three stars—but there’s no escaping the fact that this story is episodic and far too padded. And God knows what all that allegory and symbolism is about—it’s a pretty typical example of the kind of overblown story you would expect from two smart undergraduates.⁴

•

The Wall by Josephine Saxton has a pretty good blurb from Bonfiglioli (or more likely from Parkhill-Rathbone), “A story as vivid as a Kafka nightmare, and as true as you think.” The piece begins by describing a saucer shaped valley with huge towering mountains at the sides, and a thick wall running through the middle:

It was a very high wall, thirty feet in height, and it was very ancient in its stone, dark blue, hard, impenetrable, but rough and worn. Crystalline almost, its surfaces sprang this way and that, revealing whole lumps of glittering faceted hardness, with smooth places where mosses and orange lichens had got hold; and at its foot many creeping plants; tough twisted vines bearing clusters of ungathered raisins, convolvulus white and pink, and ivy in many colours, thick, glossy and spidery. Here and there stones had fallen from its old structure, two and three feet thick, and in one place, almost halfway across the floor of the valley, there was a hole through the wall, only six inches across its greatest measurement, and three feet from the floor, which was moist red clay on the north side, and dry white sand on the south side. The top of the wall was sealed to all climbers by rows of dreadful spikes which curved in every direction, cruel, needle sharp, glassy metal rapiers set into green bronze. They were impenetrable in every way, these swords, and stood endless guard between north and south.  pp. 72-73

On either side of the wall are a man and a woman, who can only communicate through the hole. The story describes the pair and their love for each other, even though their relationship is restricted to talking and holding hands.
Eventually the man and woman decide to part, and they both move away from the wall to see if they can find other people with whom they can have a normal life. When they move up the slopes of either side of the valley, they meet people of the opposite sex, and make love with them. Afterwards they both look across the valley and see what the other has done, rush back to the wall, and start climbing it so they can be together. At the top of the wall (spoiler) they end up impaled on the spikes and then, at either side of them, they can see the bodies of many other couples along the top of the wall who have come to the same end—something they never noticed before.
After they die the story ends with another couple moving towards the wall.
This story impressed me less this time around than it has on previous readings, but that is probably because part of the story’s power is the final image of the lovers impaled on the top of wall—the effect of this is obviously lessened on the fourth (or fifth?) reading. And there are also parts of the story that felt like they could have done with some polishing. Still, this allegorical fantasy is one of the more notable stories the magazine published, and if you haven’t come across it, it’s worth a read.

•

Yesterdays’ Gardens by Johnny Byrne starts with a young girl pestering her uncle to let her go outside into the garden which, we learn later, is a post-nuclear war wasteland (withered vegetation, the night a “big light” came, etc., etc.):

The child altered carefully the position of a bed. She didn’t appear to hear him. “Why do you never go into the garden?” she said suddenly.
“Gardens are bad for people. They’re bad for the hair, bad for the bone and worse for little children.” Uncle Ernie spoke as if he were remembering a well-remembered lesson. His niece echoed him parrotlike:
.
Little boys and
girls should know
that gardens in
air are bad they
give pain in the
head pain in the
bone and all the
lovely hair is
vanished by the
nasty jealous air
.
“Why is the garden dry and yellow?” She never looked at him when she asked this question. “When I was little it was green and noisy. Why isn’t it noisy now?”  p. 80

The story goes on like this for a while before the girl eventually gets a box she has been repeatedly asking the uncle for, and then talks to (what I presume was) an invisible friend.
Parts of this are reasonably well done but it’s all rather inconsequential, and I didn’t entirely understand what happens at the end (if anything).

•

The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann concludes in this issue with a much shorter part (42 pp.) than the first, and starts with Tanaquil paralysed and surrounded by cats that Vel has put under a spell, including her pet Bast:

She was not surprised when he sprang onto the couch and placed an affectionate paw on her arm. Often he slept beside her. Often he laid his head against her cheek. Dearest Bast, your fur is warmth on a cold night. Friendliness. Familiarity. But where is Arnth? Where is my father? They too need your protection.
He prodded her with his paw. Then, foot over foot, he mounted her body and peered into her eyes. He was a heavy animal; it was hard to breathe with the weight of his pressing claws. She felt the heat of his breath and smelled an acrid, salty scent which she did not recognise. Not only his scent was different. He looked somehow—alien. Perhaps she had frightened him with her stillness. On other nights she had cradled him in her arms. He peered at her with nothing which she could read. Slowly, with deliberate grace, like a trained leopard in one of the great circuses at Tarquinia, he raised his paw.
Then she recognized the smell on his fur. It was blood. The prodding paw, the slow advance, and now, the fixedly staring, almost hypnotic eyes, were gestures shrewdly calculated to tease and torture her. He did not intend to hurry his play. His eyes looked as cold as a topaz under the water. Perhaps they had always been cold. But now she was able to read them without the sentimentalizing haze of her affection, and she grasped the terrible truth that love can never be compelled, from man, from sprite, from beast; that one who loves, however she longs for requital, however long she waits, may receive in return the reverse of what she gives, the dark side of the moon.  pp. 84-85

Vegoia comes to Tanaquil and Arnth’s rescue, and tells them that she only meant the cats to disable the guards so Vel could escape—but now there has been a massacre in the town. She tells Arnth that he must take Tanaquil away before the slaves wake and take their revenge on any of the masters who are still alive.
After the drugs eventually wear off the pair have a difficult time getting out of the town, and face abuse and threats on the way out, but eventually reach the forest. There, they meet Vegoia again. Much to Tanaquil’s chagrin (she now harbours carnal thoughts for Arnth), she watches as he and Vegoia embrace.
After this dramatic start to the second instalment, the rest is a downhill slide: Vegoia and Arnth spend the night together, and then she sends him to make love to Tanaquil. The visit is a disaster, with Tanaquil telling him she doesn’t want Vegoia’s “leavings.” Then Vel appears and attacks her, but dies when he jumps on a hatchet that Tanaquil picks up to defend herself.
The rest of the story is even gloomier: Tanaquil grieves (unsure whether this is for Vel, or her father, or both), and then Vegoia falls ill: it soon becomes apparent she is dying. Vegoia later takes Arnth to a clearing in the forest that is special to her and, after she explains what is happening to her, she sends him away. That night a corn-sprite summons him, and he canoes across the lake to talk to her spirit, and later finds her body.
A month later, Arne and Tanaquil leave for Rome and, as the last passage shows, they are now a couple:

“I’ll go to Rome,” she said. “I understand that there’s a shortage of women. Didn’t the first Romans have to steal their mates from the Sabines?”
“But that was a long time ago.”
“How do you know there isn’t still a shortage?”
“That’s their problem,” said Arnth firmly. “You’re with me.”
“Am I, Arnth?”
She placed a hand on his arm. It was a comfortable hand. What had Vegoia said? “It is the measure of a man that he can move from woodfire to hearthfire without bitterness, without reproaching the gods, his enemies, or himself.” He would never forget that brief, bright burning in a wintry forest, the blue and the amber.
But hearthfires were also good.  p. 126

This is an enjoyable novel, but it is nowhere as good as The Blue Monkeys, and the first part is better than this second—especially as the tragedy in the latter seems a little overdone. There is no particular explanation for Vegoia’s demise (although she has a heart at the end, which may explain matters). Maybe Tanaquil’s romantic rival just needed to disappear for plot reasons.⁵

•••

This issue’s Cover by Keith Roberts is one of his better pieces and, if you can drag your eyes away from the face in the painting (which I finally managed to do after a number of decades), you can see the magpie with the lizard in its beak lower left, which is part of a scene from the Brian W. Aldiss story.
SF or Not SF? A Letter from a Reader by Brian Stableford takes up the editorial space with one of those “Whither SF” letters. It starts with some pigeon holing before moving on to the magic of SF and its sense of wonder.
Letter From a Reader by Kenneth F. Slater is another long letter at the back of the issue (you wonder if Bonfiglioli has realised he can fill small holes in the line-up with reader’s correspondence). Slater’s letter is of more interest than Stableford’s, and it makes a number of points. First off he has this to say about the end of the pulps:

I must start by disagreeing with one point you make—hack writing was not the death of the pulps—the hack writer is still with us, ploughing the same old furrow for the pb editor. The pulps died because of a triple factor of economics (that old pulp paper just wasn’t that cheap any more), and competition from three sources—the ‘comic’ books—the One-eyed Monster—and the paperback. Incidentally, the hack still plies his trade for the comics, which are read by the same age-groups (the ten-year-old to the thirty-year-olds . . . and year by year that thirty goes up) who before the second WW were the main pulp market.  p. 127

After this he talks about the survival of the SF magazines, literary excellence vs. readability, and the overuse of certain tropes (“the overworked holocaust”).

•••

There is nothing particularly outstanding in this issue (although the Saxton is noteworthy), but the overall quality is much better than normal.  ●

____________________

1. John Boston (Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 p. 268-270) confirms that The Day of the Doomed King is “a retelling of a Serbian legend” (he gleaned this information from Aldiss’s The Twinkling of An Eye) and says:

It’s not my cup of tea but nonetheless very good, one of the early stories in which Aldiss began to shake the dust of SF as he had known it off his boots and to head for more ambiguous territory.  p. 269

I’d suggest this process had been going on for at least a couple of years by this point (Shards, Man on Bridge, Pink Plastic Gods, Man in his Time, etc.).
As for the others, he relays Bonfiglioli’s summary of reader comments (in Science Fantasy #80) about the Saxton, says the Hill is “better and funnier than [its] description makes it sound,” and adds that the Byrne is “literary and surreal” and “a return to form.” (He also notes that this is Byrne’s last appearance in the magazine and that he “would soon be snared by television.”)
He covers Mackintosh & Stableford’s Beyond Time’s Aegis in more detail, noting that it was “published when Brian Stableford was seventeen or so, [and] is readable though irritating.” He adds that each of the encounters is “more colorful and allegorical than the one before.” Boston says that he suspects the story was influenced by John Brunner’s Earth is But a Star.
He also thinks that Robert’s cover painting is his “most attractive [. . .] yet.”

Graham Hall (Vector #36, November 1965, p. 12) opens with the comment, “Apart from, or perhaps because of, the inexplicable absence of Kyril Bonfiglioli, this is a well-balanced issue”—before later ending the review by saying that the issue is “a feather in Bonfiglioli’s cap.”
In between he doesn’t do much more than label the stories (Aldiss, “fantasy in in its purest and most lyrical sense;” Saxton, “a story of frustrated love with its own wild logic;” Swann, “a flowery, verbose novel,” etc.). He does say that that Ernest Hill’s The Saga of Sid is “beautiful mixture of Norse legends and straight humour, expertly stirred,” that Mackintosh & Stableford’s Beyond Time’s Aegis “introduces a plethora of unforgettable characters” during its “allegorical wandering,” and that Johnny Byrne’s Yesterday’s Gardens is “far more mature than any of [his] other tales.”

2. My previous scores for the stories were (current scores in brackets):
The Day of the Doomed King by Brian W. Aldiss ∗ (∗∗∗)
The Saga of Sid by Ernest Hill ∗ (∗)
Beyond Time’s Aegis by Craig A. Mackintosh and Brian Stableford ∗ (∗∗+)
The Wall by Josephine Saxton ∗∗ (∗∗∗+)
Yesterdays’ Gardens by Johnny Byrne ∗ (∗)
The Weirwoods (Part 2 of 2) by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗)

3. Aldiss’s The Eyes of the Doomed King had a sequel, The Eyes of the Blind King, in SF Impulse #9, November 1966 (were it not for the name change in four issues time, this issue would have been Science Fantasy #90). Presumably these stories were the by-products of his travel book, Cities and Stones: A Traveller’s Yugoslavia (1966).

4. According to his Wikipedia page, Brian Stableford graduated with a degree in biology from the University of York in 1969, so I assume Beyond Time’s Aegis was written during his first year there.
A later novel, Firefly, was, according to ISFDB, “a rewrite of Stableford’s first, previously unpublished novel, a fix-up with his first published novelette, Beyond Time’s Aegis.”

5. The Ace Books volume of the Swann’s The Weirwoods (1967) states, “A slightly different version of this novel was serialized In Science Fantasy #77, 78, and is copyright ©, 1965, by Science Fantasy.”
I didn’t look at the text in detail but there is a slight OCR word count difference in the different versions (the number in brackets is the word count difference in the book versus serial version): Chapter 1 (+25), 2 (+124), 3 (+120), 4 (+83), 5 (+71), 6 (+125), 7 (-23), 8 (-24), 9 (-3), 10 (-56).
After reading this novel I went through the ISFDB listings for Swann’s novels, and was struck by how many of his books (until some of the relatively recent Wildside Press editions) only had a single English printing.*
I also note that all of Swann’s books bar one, Queens Walk in the Dusk, were paperback originals, so it is perhaps no wonder his work is almost entirely forgotten (I’d also add that I’m surprised at his omission from the Gollancz Masterworks of Fantasy series—especially his novel Wolfwinter).
* Queens Walk in the Dusk (1977), Lady of the Bees (1976), The Goat Without Horns (1971), Wolfwinter (1972), How Are the Mighty Fallen (1974), The Not-World (1975), Will-O-the Wisp (1976), The Minikins of Yam (1976), The Tournament of Thorns (1976), The Gods Abide (1976), The Dolphin and the Deep (collection, 1968), Where is the Bird of Fire (collection, 1970).
A handful of the others only had one subsequent reprinting or omnibus edition, and only a couple were published in both the USA and the UK. There were a small number of foreign language editions.  ●